Why Scientists and Journalists Don't Always Play Well Together

David DiSalvo
, ContributorOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

A few months ago I came across a blog post written by a well-credentialed scientist, the gist of which was that he’d recently given his last interview to a journalist. So horribly were his words misrepresented in the subsequent article that he finally had to draw the line—he’d not contribute to public science schlock ever again. He was infuriated, and with good reason; not only did the article reflect poorly on him, but the focus of the research he discussed was lost in the resulting muck.

That unpleasant thumbnail touches on a debate that has been brewing in science and journalism circles for a long time, though recently it has been percolating to the surface in blog posts, tweets, and flaming Facebook entries. And while in some sense the debate will never end (because, well, these debates never do), this one should be troubling to more than just the interlocutors involved. Science knowledge brought to the public’s doorstep is colored by this debate, for better and for worse—and if you think public education is important, then you already know that the associated risks are not small.

I’ve spoken to people with strong feelings on both sides of this issue. While few on either side completely disparage the other, it’s fair to say that scientists are generally skeptical of journalists, and journalists, while they might not like it, are used to being viewed askance by scientists.

They chalk the scientists’ skepticism up to the “personality” of those drawn to technical disciplines. As an engineer with a penchant for harping on minor details once told me, “You know, I wouldn’t have to keep correcting you if you didn’t keep being wrong.” That, in a nutshell, describes the alleged technical/scientific “personality”—at least in the view of many in the journalism world.

And if the debate were that simple, we could brush it aside as a quirky nose-thumbing match between professionals. But it’s not. Harder issues are involved than personality types and tones. The biggest and, in my view, most intractable of these is mistrust.

Scientists mistrust journalists because the popular market for news can, and very often does, affect how stories are told. This is particularly true now, with the standard-bearers of traditional journalism giving way to the sprawling fragmentation of online news. Many journalists have been forced to become mercenaries in a marketplace with few empires left to retain their services fulltime. The pressures working against survival in this market are severe, and time constraints to produce an enormous amount of copy in any given week are rarely flexible.

But even before this market materialized, the traditional news outlets were showing signs of slippage on fact checking and filtering sensational claims from quality content. And journalists, watching as chips of the stoic walls began crumbling, were under unmanageable pressure to produce to keep their jobs.

Scientists, as sources to journalists in the maelstrom, have become increasingly fearful that the credibility of their findings is being stretched thin to grab readers’ attention. Making the news “sexy” frequently means glossing over crucial distinctions, like the classic distinction between correlation and causation (correlation is never as sexy as causation even on its best day).

As well, the ambiguity surrounding many scientific findings doesn’t translate well to popular messaging. What isn’t quite clear in any given research study magically becomes ‘A + B = C’ in an article about the study. The apprehensions of the researchers about broadly applying their findings may be mentioned, but by the time a reader gets to those the impact has already been made.

On the other side, many science journalists resent the fact that these criticisms are unfairly painted across the profession. For those of us who primarily focus on science topics, “getting it right” isn’t an academic exercise, it’s a heartfelt desire born of a passion for what we choose to write about. For any serious writer, not treating their chosen subject with the care it deserves isn’t an option.

That, of course, does not mean science journalists always get it right. But the writers I regularly speak to acknowledge this fact and are just as unhappy about it as the scientists. The flip side of the coin is that some scientists are not immune to overhyping findings for a little extra ink. The perfect storm occurs when an overhyping scientist meets an imprudent journalist; shortly thereafter a story about vaccines causing autism appears, as just one example.

For a long time, many journalists would fire back at scientists by saying that without the journalists, the scientists’ research would never reach anyone outside of the few who read peer-reviewed journals. This is far less true now, as many in the science community have emerged as talented communicators with the wherewithal to reach broad audiences. The blogging world features many of them, as do some of the better science magazines on your local bookstores’ shelf.